Dogville: Closed space/Espace clos

The film Dogville directed by Lars Von Trier (2003) takes literally place on a map. The action unfolds in a small town in the U.S. The houses are drawn on the ground, some elements are represented by symbols (e.g. some bushes), and the names of the streets are written on the ground. Only few pieces of furniture are added to this cartographic representation. The dreams and nightmares of the a 1:1 scale map described by Borges, Lewis Caroll and others are materialized here for the best and worst of Grace (Nicole Kidman), who will find herself trapped in this cartographic space…

By entering the town / map, Grace escapes her followers: The closed space of the town/map becomes a loophole. In this space disconnected from the rest of the world, Grace is now in security. But quickly she will start to feel trapped in this environment. This closed space turns into a nightmare as she is slowly becoming the slave of the entire community. It is a bit like if the frame of map was materializing the limits of an autonomous society disconnected from the rest of the world. The map metaphor to represent this type of space works perfectly. The map frame represents the limits of the existing. What is outside of the map does not really exist. In cinema, the link between what is in the frame and what is outside of the frame is made by the off-screen (« hors-champ »). In cartography few techniques exist (e.g. inset map, text), but the connection is usually not that obvious between what is inside the map and what is outside. Often the map works as a whole entity by itself, not as a fragment of the world (although the situation is different for atlases). The reconnection with the rest of the world will finally happen in Dogville when the followers will enter the map/city at the end of the movie. The idea of a closed, finished and static space conveyed by this map and by many others will then appear to being just an illusion; one more cartographic illusion.

Kapla: What prompted you to choose this bare symbolic form?
von Trier: I came upon it while I was fishing—I don’t know why it happened just then. The story is about a town, and you can see a town as a map. So I thought, why not make the film in that way. So, I’ve painted the buildings on the ground.
We found that this concept has many advantages. For example, as there are only symbolic walls, we can see through them and follow what other townspeople are doing all the time. We concentrate on the characters completely, as there are so few other elements involved. When you have seen the film, you should know more about the town than if the film had been shot in a real town. The idea is that the town should take form in the audience’s imagination.
Kapla: When I saw the map of Dogville you had drawn, in Peter Aalbaek Jensen’s office, I thought of Tolkien. In his books he was very particular about the maps of his ficticious countries.
von Trier: I’ve never read Tolkien. I know that many people are very enthusiastic about him, but he was not a source of inspiration. However, there is another source, and that is the film of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of Nicholas Nickleby. It was a long performance that was very stylized and was very interesting. It was a great experience for me in the ’70s.